Marketing

You could argue that the biggest challenge for a company like Evernote is finding ways to convert more freeloaders into paying customers. It's a tricky business situation and something that's totally foreign to book publishers.

Why aren't book publishers exploring more viable ways to acquire customers with free content and then converting them into paying customers?

At the PW discussion series event The Case for Libraries, moderator David Vinjamuri and a panel of experts argued that publishers and libraries are ideal marketing partners for books and authors.

Speaking at Klopotek's Publishers Forum today, Lance Fensterman, Global Senior Vice President of ReedPop - the organization that produces BookCon, New York ComicCon, and many events around the world, says the publishing world needs to not think B2B or B2C, but E2E (end-to-end). He notes that little more than five years after launch, ReedPop now runs 25 global events - making it largest producer of pop culture events around the world - and this year some one million fans will attend the events, 70% of whom are 18-35 years old.

Ever since ebooks gained traction the publishing industry has obsessed with what's typically referred to as "the discovery problem." The common wisdom is that discovery of the content will lead to fame and fortune.

I believe digital content's main challenge is more about efficiency, less about discovery, and my inspiration for this point of view comes from a totally unrelated business: the coffee industry.

enguin Random House UK and taxi ordering app Hailo have partnered on a new scheme which will see free physical and audiobooks given away. Free books will be left in cabs which use the Hailo service, under the #BlackCabBooks scheme, while audiobook extracts will be available through the app itself. The new promotion has launched today, World Book Night (23rd April), where people are encouraged to spread the joy of reading by giving books.

Penguin Random House relaunched its website yesterday, designing the new platform to drive book discovery and build community -- and perhaps most importantly, collect data. The trade publisher has listed its entire catalog on the site, complete with author pages, book recommendations, interactive games, and an ecommerce platform. It released a brief video which shared the site's new features and emphasized that it is a place where readers can come to find the books they love and discover new ones.

Publishers that see the value of conversion architectures and content marketing may still wonder, "Can we really compete in this space?" I'm strongly arguing yes, as publishers already have the skills required to compete effectively as content marketers. In fact, publishers can deliver on the promise of conversion architectures and content marketing because:

1. They are already in the business of linking content to markets, the purpose of content marketing;
2. They are established as content curators, a core component of effective content marketing;

Not available on the high street or from Amazon, The Little Girl/Boy Who Lost Her/His Name sold 132,000 copies in the UK alone in 2014, says the publisher, more than Julia Donaldson's hit picture book Superworm, making it the biggest-selling picture book of last year. And sales in the UK so far this year are already topping 20,000.

Cadji-Newby set up Hackney-based digital publishing start-up Lost My Name, the company behind the book, in 2012, with three others. "We all had day jobs," he said. "[Co-founder] Asi [Sharabi] had this grand vision

I'm an author. Late this year, I'll publish my tenth novel. Publish, that is, in the traditional way: with a Big 5 publisher and all that goes along with that. That sounds like a strong track record and, in a way, it is. Yet my strong advances haven't always been matched by stellar sales outcomes and, last year, I separated from Random House in the US, when we couldn't find a way to continue our relationship together.

In an earlier talk, "An architecture of collaboration", I argued that the market for reading may be expanding significantly, but the gains are seen almost entirely outside the prevailing book industry supply chain. "Architecture" encouraged publishers to engage with communities - and companies - to offer new sources and uses of what was once just book content.

That talk also recommended publishers do 12 things to develop "an architecture of collaboration". I ranked these 12 ideas from easiest ("Join the w3c") to hardest ("Change our approach to copyright").